<div dir="ltr">Dear all,<div><br></div><div>Thanks so much to Shu Lea for inviting us here to discuss publishing as unfinished business :) The themes & discussions of prior weeks have also been fascinating... </div><div><br></div><div>It's a curious time to be thinking about publishing when so much else momentous is going on: we've just had a ruling from the Supreme Court here in London that the government's prorogation of parliament was unlawful. The sense of social crisis fostered by years of austerity is palpable, and yet, what can sometimes seem even more so is the bedding-in of each new 'unbelievable' development as a so-called new normal. The calculatedness of power, one senses, that there is an energetics to resistance; and that the social systems that (are supposed to) support us can, over time, be relied to tip the balance in its direction – never ours.</div><div><br></div><div>Somewhat incredibly, Mute is approaching its 25th anniversary (it was launched in London with a thin pilot issue on 30th November 1994), and as it ages I have been thinking about this phenomenon of what-happens-as-time-passes in a number of contexts. Going back into higher education to do a PhD in Fine Art, for example, I was really quite shocked by how little had changed in what appeared to be students' sensibilities, aspirations and even work since I left art school in 1991. To be honest, I went about a lot of the time feeling that some of the failure to change things more was on us – our generation of media-aware writers, publishers, critics and artists, who were supposed to have rejected the art world, its spaces and values, in favour of, if not a wholly affirmative embrace of networked media, then at least intense hope around the alternative models of production they promised. We argued about their notionally innate power to upend the status-quo, route around gate-keepers, give voice, etc. in ways I imagine anyone involved thought would create some change. In keeping with much of European net culture, a magazine like Mute was never going to uncritically assert the democratising power of the internet – in fact its self-reflexive, flesh-pink corporeality intended always to insist that technology is socially and materially embedded – but, we likewise wouldn't have bothered launching a publication around the question these new media posed for art and society if we didn't believe something enormous was possible, and that this needed to be pushed for, engaged with. </div><div><br></div><div>What I see more and more, though (including in my own thinking I have to add!), is the significant difficulty of actually performing that coupling we all attempted; meaning, of thinking media WITH the social conditions that spawn, surround, and sustain it. This can lead you to the kind of back-to-front conclusions that casts a university cohort you're in, or the work that it produces, as even vaguely neutral, rather than structured from top to bottom by neoliberal education policy, financialisation, and the recomposition of staff, support and syllabus that goes with that. Or, as is perfectly understandable but increasingly problematic, to witness the panic about the 'evil' of Cambridge Analytica, or the professionally 'unfit' character of Mark Zuckerberg, and the kinds of coercive digital and image culture created by their companies. To be sure, they are the product of a racist and sexist Silicon Valley tech capitalism, deregulation, Floridaean creative cities dogma, but isn't their dominance also a – by now indeed extreme – symptom of an erasure of leftist popular education infrastructures, and the multi-pronged, decades-long attack on community resources, sociality and life? (The decline in voting in the second half of the twentieth century anyway always makes me scratch my head at how we can use the vocabulary of democracy without a hundred permanent caveats.) Even for those schooled against any easy techno-determinism, the conjuncture of forces playing out in the present are hard to untangle. Sarah Schulman's Gentrification of the Mind is really interesting on the complex ways in which MFA culture and the evisceration of cities under gentrification intersect to bleed out certain basic DiY/creative attitudes and capabilities towards organising directly in neighbourhoods and I find myself thinking of that over and over... </div><div><br></div><div>What do we do then when we, for example, witness a newly published author telling a full house of post-graduate students that her work is an attempt to address the dearth of critical analysis of 'prosumerism's' capture of free labour, as analysed by Tiziana Terranova and Trebor Scholz (here presumed to be unknown, and presented as recently (and individually) discovered). I obviously concur with the thesis on free labour, but what frankly upset me when I experienced this recently, nearly two decades after the publishing and production cultures that had been formative for me started engaging with these questions was that, somehow, the knowledge we all produced during that time hadn't become the bread-and-butter of pedagogic culture. (I do realise colleges can be unique in this respect, and that the UK very likely is worse than e.g. Europe and America, but still...).</div><div><br></div><div>I remember when Mute first applied for subsidies to do its publishing circa 1995/6, we got some furious responses from older film, video and electronic-art practitioners, who disputed our claims to any novelty or originality. In founding MayDay Rooms, I also remember coming across no amount of incredible magazines I had been unaware of, and whose editorials made me realise Mute had just been doing the kind of thing groups in any generation do – i.e. make a critical media intervention, operate on the tacit assumption it's timely, historically significant and can exert agency, and try and sustain it as if it's needed in perpetuity. These experiences were very *relativising*, shall we say, of what we had done, and seemed to beg the question of how magazines and journals occupy time. Of course it is completely fine to just accept something as bounded and historically situated, even totally done and dusted (and in our case the end of our successive stages of funding in 2013 meant our publishing definitely decelerated – though as editors we're still actively in discussion and even have our publishing spikes now and then!). It's also not as if what I'm describing hasn't happened in time immemorial... or been unpicked at length in the classic genealogies of knowledge production. But still, if you're staying active for longer as we are, it's hard not to think about how what you've produced sits in a larger ecology of publishing, media, education, etc., and I find it a shame that – bar with honourable exceptions like the collaborative magazine networks that Alessandro and Simon put so much time into – there doesn't seem to be that much thought going into that... mostly because these self-same social conditions make it so hard for anyone to think beyond immediate survival, and of course to some extent because it will always feel much too damned unique, great and exciting when you're starting something new (!). </div><div><br></div><div>What preoccupies me, then, especially in this age of 'agnotology' (the deliberate, and sometimes tactical, production/maintenance of ignorance) is how to work on this problem together – when in the background we have the Twittering Machine (as Richard Seymour's recent book describes the networked social) sucking so many of the best surplus energies from us. Also, though this is perhaps more tendentious, how words and bodies, writing and organising, seem to hurtle in opposite directions, such that we have veritable heaving virtual metropolises of conferences, panels, symposia, journals, books and blogs, without, really, anything like adequate life worlds for these to sit within, where also people whose specialisms aren't WORDS (but who anyone who's ever worked in a group knows are essential) are valorised as much as the scribes, influencers and intellectuals. A recent article in the magazine, <a href="https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/memes-force-%e2%80%93-lessons-yellow-vests">Memes with Force</a>, spoke about these expressions of the body – and a rejection of words – in relation to the Gilets Jaunes protests in France, and was to my mind utterly compelling on that point.</div><div><br></div><div>Anyway, I've gone on too long. Thank you again Shu Lea and empyre for organising these discussions, I hope these thoughts might pique others, and here's to generalising the anniversary!</div><div><br></div><div>Pauline</div><div><br></div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>***<br>Pauline van Mourik Broekman<br></div>PhD, Fine Art, RCA<br></div><div>'The Network Optic: Vision, Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov'<br></div>Email: <a href="mailto:pauline.vmbroekman@network.rca.ac.uk" target="_blank">pauline.vmbroekman@network.rca.ac.uk</a><br></div><div>Mob: 07947157338<br><br>***<br></div><div><a href="http://www.metamute.org" target="_blank">http://www.metamute.org</a><br></div><div><a href="http://www.maydayrooms.org" target="_blank">http://www.maydayrooms.org</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 at 06:46, Shu Lea Cheang <<a href="mailto:shulea@earthlink.net">shulea@earthlink.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
throw in here another thread while the wild fire of AMAZON IS
BURNING cannot be contained.<br>
<br>
I am introducing here two stay unfinished media publications whose
vision and persistence in producing ideas, introducing emergent
genres, engaging in critical dialogue, networking the spheres, are
remarkable.<br>
<br>
<em>"Mute </em>magazine was founded in 1994 to discuss the
interrelationship of art and new technologies when the World Wide
Web was newborn.......
While <em>Mute </em>was born out of a culture that celebrated the
democratising potential of new media, it becomes ever more apparent
that we need to critically engage with the ways in which new media
also reproduce and extend capitalist social relations. "- <br>
<a class="gmail-m_6349285726543758886moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.metamute.org/about-us" target="_blank">http://www.metamute.org/about-us</a><br>
<br>
"Neural is a printed magazine established in 1993 dealing with new
media art, electronic music and hacktivism. It was founded by
Alessandro Ludovico and Minus Habens Records label owner Ivan Iusco
in Bari (Italy).
The magazine’s mission was to be a magazine of ideas, becoming a
node in a larger network of digital culture publishers".
In 1997 the first Neural website was established, and it was updated
daily from September 2000." - <a class="gmail-m_6349285726543758886moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://neural.it/about/" target="_blank">http://neural.it/about/</a><br>
<br>
It is a great honor for me to introduce the Mute Team together here
online, <span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">Josephine
Berry, </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">Pauline van Mourik Broekman, </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana;color:rgb(0,0,10)">Simon Worthington and from Neural, </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"></span><span>Alessandro
Ludovico.<br>
<br>
They 'publish'....<br>
sl<br>
<br>
</span><br>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">Josephine
Berry has been part of the editorial collective of Mute
magazine, from intern
to Editor and now board member, from 1995 til today. She was a
passionate
believer in DIY media during the 1990s, and in a much less
euphoric way to this
day. She wrote the first dissertation on net.art in the late
90s. From this
time her attention has shifted to a more specific investigation
of art and
creativity’s relationship to late capitalism and the
abstraction, mimesis and norming
of creative life in both.<span> </span>Her
monograph,
'Art and (Bare) Life', (Sternberg Press, 2018), brings the
biopolitical theory
initiated by Michel Foucault to bear on aesthetic theories of
autonomous art in
order to consider how the avant-garde 'blurring of art and life'
intersects
with the modern state's orientation to 'life itself'. This
project grew out of
an earlier book project, co-authored with Anthony Iles, titled
'No Room to
Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City' (Mute Books, 2010),
which considered
the use of contemporary art within neoliberal urban
regeneration.<span> </span>Josephine
lectures on culture industry at
Goldsmiths, University of London.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">Pauline van Mourik Broekman is the
co-founder and
co-publisher, with Simon Worthington, of Mute magazine, for
which she also
served as co-editor and contributing editor. Published in print
and online
between 1994 and 2013, Mute also ran many media projects,
including Fallout
Radio (with Kate Rich), and OpenMute, a software and platform
development
project for independent producers. From 2011-2013 it also shared
in
coordination of the Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University,
Germany. Mute has
since that time continued as a voluntarily run online journal
– with all
editors working together as a collective. <u></u><u></u></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">In 2011 Pauline co-founded MayDay
Rooms, which seeks to
activate historical material in political struggles, and broadly
to socialise
practices of historical research and archival work. Its
commitment to
anti-copyright practices, commoning and free education was also
a feature in
work done with Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media
and Ted
Byfield, which concluded in Open Education: A Study in
Disruption, co-authored
with Gary Hall (Roman and Littlefield International, 2014). <u></u><u></u></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">Since 2014, she has been doing a
practice-based PhD at the Royal
College of Art, London, titled: The Network Optic: Vision,
Authorship and
Collectivity after Vertov. <u></u><u></u></span>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:7pt"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana;color:rgb(0,0,10)">Simon Worthington is a researcher in future
publishing — free
and open source systems, economic models, and the politics of
Open Science.
Author of ‘The Book Liberation Manifesto’ supporting the FOSS
community to make
research available to all through platform independent,
interoperable
publications. He is the Editor-in-Chief at <i>Generation
Research</i> an
editorial platform for open scholarship for the Leibniz
Association Research
Alliance Open Science and is based in R&D at the Open
Science Lab, TIB –
German National Library of Science and Technology. As of 2019 he
is a Board
Member of FORCE11 an organisation for the future of scholarly
communication. He
has worked as a research author for the Akademienunion at the
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften on ‘AGATE’ a
research
publication for scoping the technical data connection of all of
Europe’s
Academies of Arts and Science digital repositories. From 2012/15
he led the
research unit ‘Publishing Consortium’ as part of the Hybrid
Publishing Lab at Leuphana
University, Germany. In 1994 he co-founded and published <i>Mute</i>
magazine a
culture and technology publication, the European counter to <i>Wired</i>
magazine, and continues as a member of the editorial collective
and as
publisher. He originally studied media art at the Slade School,
UCL (UK) and
CalArts (USA).</span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><u></u><u></u></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana;color:rgb(0,0,10)"> ORCID </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8579-9717" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8579-9717</span></a></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana;color:rgb(0,0,10)"> @mrchristian99 </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><a href="mailto:simon.worthington@tib.eu" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">simon.worthington@tib.eu</span></a></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana;color:rgb(0,0,10)"> <i>Generation Research</i> </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><a href="https://genr.eu/" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">https://genr.eu/</span></a></span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana;color:rgb(0,0,10)"> The
Book
Liberation Manifesto </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://linkme2.net/1gs" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">http://linkme2.net/1gs</span></a></span><span><u></u><u></u></span>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"> </span><span><br>
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Alessandro
Ludovico is a researcher, artist and chief editor of Neural
magazine since
1993. He received his Ph.D. degree in English and Media from
Anglia Ruskin
University in Cambridge (UK). He is Associate Professor at the
Winchester
School of Art, University of Southampton, where he joined the
AMT (Archeology
of Media and technology) research group. He has published and
edited several
books, among them “Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of
Publishing since
1894", and has lectured worldwide. He also served as an advisor
for the
Documenta 12's Magazine Project. He is one of the authors of the
award-winning
Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks (Google Will Eat Itself,
Amazon Noir,
Face to Facebook).<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://neural.it" target="_blank"><span>http://neural.it</span></a></span><span> <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<span></span>
</div>
_______________________________________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></blockquote></div>